The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is choosing works for its first new permanent exhibition in two decades

Hailing the Ferry, Daniel Ridgway Knight’s richly hued rural scene of two women standing beside a river, is one of the stars at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Widely reproduced and recognized, the 1888 canvas is the kind of work that art museums strive to own: a beloved friend that draws visitors back over and over again.

Yet when PAFA opens its new permanent exhibition in 2026, Hailing the Ferry may or may not be part of it. Right now it’s on the tentative list of works expected to be on display.

“But I don’t know if that’s going to end up making the cut,” said Anna O. Marley, who recently finished up 15 years in senior artistic posts at PAFA. “I love that painting. But you know, we’ve brought so much new wonderful work into the collection in the past 20 years — high academic realism from the late 19th and early 20th century. Is that the most important story that we need to tell?”

Stories — what they say, who gets to tell them — have moved to the forefront of attention at American art museums, and perhaps no walls will be scrutinized as closely as PAFA’s. The new permanent exhibition is the last expected piece in the academy’s controversial institutional retooling, and it should leave the museum sitting pretty for 2026, when the city expects millions of visitors for the nation’s 250th birthday.

“The art collection at PAFA is better than the American art collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in terms of its breadth and its depth in historical canonical American art. There’s just more of it, right?” said Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, University of Pennsylvania art history professor and faculty director of the Arthur Ross Gallery. For the new permanent collection, PAFA should “lean into that and showcase the masterpieces that are in it and put them in dialogue with other works that speak to them,” she said.

The new exhibition may not be opening until spring 2026, but the decisions about what’s in and what’s out are being made now. The last time PAFA did a reinstallation of its permanent collection was in 2005; the vast majority of works were by white men.

Will PAFA tell the story of American art this time in a way that more comprehensively considers race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity?

PAFA has a long history of allegations of mistreating Black artists and women, even as it has considerable strengths in these collection areas through donations from Harold A. and Ann R. Sorgenti, Linda Lee Alter, Constance Clayton, the estate of artists John and Richanda Rhoden, and works purchased with PAFA’s own acquisitions funds.

But a permanent exhibition inevitably makes a bigger statement than individual works or one-off exhibitions. The selection of a few pieces from many creates a kind of pantheon effect, inferring greatness on the chosen works.

In fact, this new permanent exhibition will make several statements simultaneously, says Judith E. Stein, a former PAFA curator who now works independently.

“One statement is, ‘This is the oldest art museum and school in the country and this is a portrait of what it has been collecting since day one.’ It’s a picture of the institution,” she said.

Another statement:

“How do the people living now in charge of the collection interpret what is important to share with the public? What would the public be interested in seeing today, in the 21st century? The number of cards in the deck is set,” said Stein, “but how it’s arranged and what cards get put down — that’s important.”

PAFA would like to arrive at a permanent exhibition with about 250 to 350 works pulled from the 16,000 or so it owns, which necessarily means “there’s so much that gets left out,” said Marley.

Visitors often come into the museum looking for their favorites, and when they don’t see them, they “are very angry that they’re not there.”

Work on the new permanent exhibition proceeds even as the institution undergoes a series of profound changes. PAFA announced in January that it would be winding down its college degree program and reviving its certificate program. In July, the academy closed its 1876 Furness and Hewitt building — where the new permanent exhibition will be mounted — for a yearlong HVAC replacement project.

Marley left in July to become director of curatorial affairs at the Toledo Museum of Art, and Harry Philbrick returned to PAFA Oct. 1 as interim director of the museum.

More leadership turnover is on the way. The academy recently announced that president and CEO Eric G. Pryor is stepping down in December after three years when his contract ends.

But the permanent exhibition selection process is well along. A checklist of works to be included is expected by the end of the year.

Marley and others at the museum worked with outside artists, scholars, and community members to develop themes for the exhibition, a structure which, among other things, means it won’t be presented in a chronological narrative.

“Because when I told the story of ‘Making American Artists’ [the show that closed in April 2023], I didn’t want to start out with a group of settler colonial white men. Which, if you start with 1776 with most collections, including ours, that’s the narrative you’re going to start with. That’s what you have, right? And actually our collection is pretty phenomenal and incredibly diverse,” Marley said.

The museum arrived at seven themes for the permanent exhibition (which may change somewhat):

“The great thing about this collection is that we’ve been collecting contemporary American art since 1811, so pretty much anything you want to touch on, and any of those issues, is in the collection.”

Pretty much anything, but not everything. PAFA, for instance, is strong on 18th and 19th century art, but not all artists. “We’re not going to go back and start collecting Native American art from that period. But what we can do and what we’ve already started doing is commissioning amazing pieces by contemporary Native American artists,” said Marley.

As for old favorites that must be included, some pieces are obvious — works like Charles Willson Peale’s The Artist in His Museum and Henry O. Tanner’s Nicodemus.

“They’re not only great paintings,” said Marley, “they’re just historically important and so connected with Philadelphia and the nation. And Winslow Homer’s The Fox Hunt is one of the best paintings in the world bar none, so that’s got to be there.”

Ultimately, developing a new permanent exhibition is going to be an exercise in trying to please loyal visitors as well as entice new patrons.

“I hope that we can do both, that we’re not like a mausoleum to the past or to what a certain demographic thinks American art should be, but a place where you can always discover something new and you can find your touchstones that you love,” said Marley. “There are so many stories to tell, and so we’re trying to strike a balance. Because we want scholars of American art to want to come here. We want Philadelphians to come here. We want it all.”